t8hants

Can't be bothered with making armatures, so I use dried grape stems and propriatory clump materials.

A quite lane by a much neglected farm cottage, occupied by a lonely widow who lost her love in WW1

Rather pleased with the look of this, I had to remodel the row of cottages by the chapel as I din't like them in the end. Only needs some tidying

Thanks for the advice, I can see I have not allowed sufficient droppers onto the busbar at the moment. I think I am Ok with the track expansion, as I have allowed 1mm per joint/yard. Thanks to Happy Hippo’s tip of pushing trucks around the trackwork to test it, I can now see exactly where due to absent fixings, there are slight twists that are causing the derailments. As I now need to get hold of other bits and pieces the P-way gang have been put on other duties. The Dapol pannier has been returned snug in its box awaiting the day when it can make a complete circuit.

I am now discounting any fault with the loco apart from my inability to place it on the track correctly. That’s a good tip to push wagons around the track to check for track issues, save seeing my loco taking a dive into the pond. You will have to excuse me; this is my first venture into garden O gauge and I probably was expecting things to be slightly more tolerant than they appear to be. The track panels are fixed on the ends of the sleepers, but because I am short of track pins, I have until now been staggering them up the length of the track panel, and possibly fixing them too hard. They are soldered together for power continuity The under framing is two layers of 5” wide ¾ ply, with the top layer chamfered on the edges to round the felt over, screwed into 4”x 2” on edge, as most of the track is only single line. It is level and flat, jungle joinery I can do. Railway wise this is very much an on the job learning curve. One quick question how many feet apart should one consider putting power booster cables in around the track?

The loco is straight out of the box as supplied by Dapol, but there was a distinct brrrr as it was going along on the set track test piece. Further tests on a straight length have not repeated the noise and it won't always do it on the curve. Thinking about it, as the track was on the carpet and the floor is not an easy place for me to get to these days, I wonder if I had one wheel slightly mis-aligned, but there was no visible shaking and I would have expected more of a bump-bump-bump, rather than the gentle brrrr I could hear. Returning to the derailments, I am convinced they were caused by slight deviations in the track, which is not fully fixed down yet as I await more track pins.

Hi Simon, thank you for taking the effort to do the typing. I have just measured the back-to-back on the loco and all are 29.2mm ish, so the loco is Ok. I am slightly puzzled by the apparent bumping along the rail chairs on the set track curve, but it stayed on, which is more than it did on my trackwork so far. Having eliminated the unlikely, it must be the most likely, which is my trackwork needs a lot more fettling yet. It has a long way to go before I risk my precious Adams O2 on it. I also found the O gauge guild standard sheets, but I have a degree of learning to do before that fully sinks in.

Eager to try out my just laid O gauge garden track (Peco code 124) I was slightly disappointed when my Dapol pannier derailed after only a few feet, this I put down to it not being properly flat yet, it is laid on stone chip roofing felt. I was also concerned that my tightish radius was too tight, it’s about 100mm bigger than a No2 curve. I tried my loco on a quadrant of No 2 set-track which it went around Ok, but with a distinct rumble of what I presume was the flanges running on the plastic rail chairs. I measured the over flanges distance on my loco and got 30.5mm and the width of the top of Peco rail is 1.5mm, so it seems to my inexperienced eye that it is quite possible for my loco to fall between the rails. Is the over flange measurement on my pannier correct for the model please? Thanks.......Gareth

Are there two film 'Easter eggs' I believe their called, in the name of the doomed loco "Le General Rive-Reine" ? The General was of course the famous Buster Keaton loco movie, and Rive-Reine was one of the stations in the Burt Lancaster movie 'The Train'

I am finally beginning to see the end of the basic landscaping phase of my layout. I gave myself every disadvantage, as I can only get at it from one side and it is only 3’-6” wide for most of its 18’ length, swelling to a voluptuous 4’ at one end. This means I have to stand on a hop-up to reach the back and have had to model from back to front as I go. This has been an enjoyable on the job learning experience. The cottages are from “In the Greenwood laser”, I love the chunkiness of their feel and construction, he even did three pairs of ‘specials’ for me on request, one day I hope he will produce random stone versions. My trees are grape stem and clump foliage, or bits of seafoam and saw dust. To force the perspective, they get larger closer to the front, other buildings are either kits, Skaledale, or my basic ventures into scratch building. There it is, a small section of the little known Llanryde to Aberventnor railway a fusion, or is it mash up, of early B.R. South Wales and the Isle of Wight Southern.

No early BR in the little known Wight Valley of South Wales, the line runs from Llanryde to Aberventnor.

This is my first attempt at creating landscape for my layout, using insulation foam, poster paint, sea foam and scatter materials. I have surprised myself in how good I think it looks.

Going through some old photos I came across this picture that I took aged 7, when we were off on our holidays to South Wales. The only railway photo I ever took, apparently of 4931 Hanbury Hall, I think taken at Salisbury, I seem to remember we had to change at Salisbury from Portsmouth Harbour, probably the spring or autumn of 1961. Little merit as a picture and taken on an ancient 120 roll film camera, the boy wouldn't get out of the way.

Going through some old photos I came across this picture that I took aged 7, when we were off on our holidays to South Wales. The only railway photo I ever took, apparently of 4931 Hanbury Hall, operating the 'Red Dragon' from Portsmouth Harbour to Cardiff or return, I can't remember now, probably the autumn of 1961. Little merit as a picture and taken on an ancient 120 roll film camera, the boy wouldn't get out of the way.

No one has mentioned the VR section of the programme. If in the near future, you will build your Airfix Spitfire 'on screen' in VR and then take off and fight the dastardly Hun in endless air battles, where does that leave the need for space cluttering real models? Likewise we have had low definition build your own layout simulators for years, but when they finally crack HD VR railways, any era, place, or stock, again confined to the system of your choice, who will want to take up valuable physical space in ever shrinking sized homes with a real layout. If I could create a layout where I could take a stroll through the countryside, and watch the shunting in the yard I have created, or get underneath the loco and watch the motion, even sit in the fire-box and watch the coal coming in, perhaps take a drink the pub, be a guest at the wedding, or help fight the fire: in other words be a participant in the the hundred and one different scenarios modellers have created in static models, why would I want to bother with space consuming largely static conventional layout? If such a system was available now, I perhaps wouldn't even consider traditional railway modeling and I'm in my mid sixties. Hornby must go down that path, or they will be like the British bike industry of the sixties, blind to the winds of change, luckily the UK is renown for it high quality VR work, so the future should remain bright for Hornby, but we might not recognize the company in the future.